Horton Plains

Horton Plains is home to a spectacular 12km hike through Sri Lanka's only Cloud Forest national park. For the uninitiated, the two big attractions here are World's End—a sheer cliff with an 870m drop—and Baker's Falls, a 20m waterfall named after the 18th Century explorer Samuel Baker.

An aerial photograph of the World's End precipice. The mountain in the background above and to the left of the arrow is Kirigalpota, which you can also access via Horton Plains

Baker's Falls, discovered by Samuel Baker in the midst of a sambar hunt in the 1800s. Our audioguide contains a reenactment of Baker's own rather harrowing telling of the story

While most tourists visit to see just those two things, there's a lot more to it than that. Horton Plains is home to heaps of endemic species of plants and animals regularly seen here and found nowhere outside the cloud forests of Sri Lanka. This ecosystem is one of the rarest and most vulnerable in existence today.

The endemic tree frog Taruga eques. Horton plains is home to dozens of endemic species you can hear throughout your walk

The purple-faced leaf monkey—the largest primate on the plains and also the one you're most likely to encounter

The Ceylon Blue Magpie, one of 18 species of birds we see pretty regularly on The Plains

One of several leopards that stalk and kill sambar. Outside of Yala they're at their highest density on Horton Plains

Images of: the endemic frog Taruga Eques, Purple-faced Leaf Monkey, a colourful bird and a leopard on Horton Plains

Some of the locals we'll introduce you to in the audioguide. Clockwise, from top left: The endemic tree frog Taruga eques; One of several leopards that stalk and kill sambar; The Ceylon Blue Magpie, one of 18 species of birds we see pretty regularly on The Plains; The purple-faced leaf monkey—the largest primate on the plains and also the one you're most likely to encounter

While Horton Plains owes its status as a National Park to its scenery and biodiversity, even the history of the Plains is spellbinding. Horton Plains remains an active archeological site where not just specialists, but even random visitors (including me!) have found stone-age tools and other relics left by Sri Lanka's original cavemen, over 20,000 years ago.

People seem to forget that 18th-Century Sri Lanka was one of the jewels of the British Empire, and some wild stories from that era still live on in Horton Plains. To name a few, Queen Victoria's grandson chased and butchered Sambar (the deer-like animals on Horton Plains), Earnst Haekel (who drew up one of the first trees of life) casually shot at herds of elephants, Samuel Baker (Bakers Falls) lead packs of hounds hunting on The Plains and Thomas Rogers (a historical nobody) singlehandedly killed almost every elephant in the country before the almighty intervened.

The quartz stone-age microlith I found circa 2008, used by stone-age humans on Horton Plains 28,000 years ago

Prince Albert posing with a dead sambar in 1870 near Kirigalpota, by Horton Plains

Earnst Haeckel's painting of Adams Peak, from Horton Plains

One of Earnst Haekel's paintings of Adam's Peak at sunrise as seen from Horton Plains in 1882

Samuel Baker's dogs mauling a Sambar, taken from one of Baker's best-selling books published in 1854

Left: Samuel Baker's dogs mauling a Sambar, taken from one of Baker's best-selling books published in 1854; Right: Prince Albert posing with a dead sambar in 1870 near Kirigalpota, by Horton Plains

I've worked with Rohan Pethiyagoda and an entire team of zoologists, cartographers, photographers, archeologists and voice actors to assemble what we think is the missing audioguide to Horton Plains. In it you'll hear about all this and much more, including a few short lessons on animal behaviour, ecology and geology, and of course some girl-guide/boy-scout stuff like how to identify birds and frogs by just their calls.

As you can probably tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about this. If you'd just like a hike, Horton Plains and this audioguide probably aren't for you (Ella's probably more your style). But for everyone else, I think it'd be a shame to visit the plains without it.

About the expert

Rohan Pethiyagoda is one of Sri Lanka's best-known biodiversity scientists, mostly because over the last 30 years he and his colleagues are responsible for the discovery of almost 150 new species of animals from Sri Lanka (a few of which are endemic to Horton Plains).

If have your finger on the pulse of the biodiversity community some of Rohan's roles and accomplishments are probably familiar to you: He was elected deputy chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, he's published about 60 papers in scientific journals (including a few in Nature and Science) and he currently serves as editor of Asian Freshwater Fishes for Zootaxa. That said, if you've seen Rohan in the news before it's probably because he named an entire genus of fish after Richard Dawkins in 2012 which, for reasons we still don't understand today, made a bit of a splash in the British media.

Rohan's written quite a few books on the biodiversity and natural history of Sri Lanka, including "Horton Plains: Sri Lanka's Cloud Forest National Park", which is generally considered the definitive guide to Horton Plains. For this park, there's probably no better person in the world to be your guide.

All AudioLanka guides feature:

Offline Access

All guides work offline. Download them before you head to your destination via a secure in-app purchase and you're all set

Curated Audio

Produced and narrated by local and international researchers, academics and domain experts

Offline Maps

High-quality, bespoke offline maps and imagery by field guides and award-winning photographers

HORTON PLAINS

About the expert

All AudioLanka guides feature:

Offline Access

Curated Audio

Offline Maps

One last thing...